Physics Frontier Center News

JQI Fellow and Assistant Professor of physics Vladimir Manucharyan has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. His proposal, entitled “Realizing the ultrastrong coupling regime of quantum electrodynamics using high-impedance Josephson superconducting circuits,” will receive five years of funding. NSF funds research in science and engineering through grants, contracts and cooperative agreements.

For more information on NSF Awards visit: http://www.nsf.gov/about/

Every electrical device is enabled by the movement of charge, or current. ‘Spintronics’ taps into a different electronic attribute, an intrinsic quantum property known as spin, and may yield devices that operate on the basis of spin-transport. JQI/CMTC theorists have been developing a model for what happens when spins are trapped in an optical lattice structure with a “double-valley” feature. This new result opens up a novel path for generating what’s known as the spin Hall effect, an important example of spin-transport.

JQI scientists have added an important technique to the atomtronics arsenal, a method for analyzing a superfluid circuit component called a ‘weak link’. The result, detailed in the online journal Physical Review X, is the first direct measurement of the current-phase relationship of a weak link in a cold atom system.

Recently physicists led JQI Fellow Christopher Monroe have executed an MRI-like diagnostic on a crystal of interacting quantum spins. They predict that their method is scalable and may be useful for validating experiments with much larger ensembles of interacting spins.